People, especially the Japanese themselves, always seem to have the idea that the Japanese language is difficult. The truth is that it isn’t, at least as far as speaking is concerned : The verbs are regular, and the grammar is uniform, written letters always conform to the same sound, and there are no tricky articles or tenses.
Compare this to English with our seemingly unrelated spellings and pronunciations (why is the present and past tense of “read” spelt the same but said differently?, why do we use both “f” and “ph”? Why is “c” hard in “crisp” but soft in “circus”?), our completely un-standardised verb-conjugations (“If “played” is correct, why don’t we say “eated”?), our completely whimsical use of prepositions and articles (“We go to the bank” but we need no ‘the’ when “We go to school”.). And these are just problems my primary school students have.
So in terms of gaining spoken ability, Japanese is quite straight forward. Which is more than can be said for writing: Firstly Japanese has two main “alphabets”, of 56 main characters each, one for Japanese words (Hiragana), one for loan words from other languages (Katakana). Not so bad, only about twice as much to learn as the alphabet’s upper and lower cases.
BUT… The Japanese don’t write most of their words using these alphabets. Only up to the age of seven or eight do any Japanese actually write full sentences in these alphabets. From age nine and up they simply use them for inflecting verbs, as prepositions and to write foreign words. : For the verb stems, adjectives and nouns, they use kanji. Kanji are Chinese ideographs – the things that people in the UK occasionally get tattooed with, thinking themselves cool to write something they can’t read permanently on their body. Now, to read a newspaper in Japanese, it’s estimated that you need to know 1,945 kanji before you even get to specialist words such as those found in science, economics etc.
In addition to this dizzying amount of lines, squiggles and dashes, the kanji (unlike the alphabets) don’t even have the same pronunciation everytime you see them. Take the kanji for “outside” for example, it can be pronounced “gai”,”ge”,”ha(zure)” and “soto” depending on the sentence which it is in, and which kanji character precedes or follows it. And four readings is by no means rare. Some kanji have up to eight ways to read them, depending on context.
There is no sure way, when looking at unknown kanji to even begin to guess what they sound like (unlike unknown words in any European language). The alphabet represents sounds, so even when seeing a new word we can hazard a guess to its pronunciation. Kanji on the other hand represents an idea – hard to guess what an previously unknown idea sounds like!
Dictionaries for kanji are arranged commonly according to the order in which their strokes are written: With some kanji needing up to 30 strokes of the pen to write, you also have to remember them in order, to be able to use the dictionary. Another way dictionaries use is to break the kanji down into smaller components and to list them according to these, but it can still take a full five minutes to find one word – something which makes reading road signs while on the move really tricky.
Kanji is on my brain today because I am to be the MC at my company’s All Staff Training event next week, and I have just been given my script. I’ll be awake most of the weekend before I sort out what it even means…
Posted by mostlyrawfish 